ogc163
Superstar
By Katy Kelleher Nov 13, 2019, 8:00am EST
The story starts with a gothic mansion, all stone turrets and peaked windows, a fortress-like structure. The camera descends from a dark swirling sky to a full moon to finally frame the mansion. A male voice narrates Shirley Jackson’s famous opening lines from her 1959 gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House: “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut,” he reads. We are told, from the moment we start the show, that this is a story about a house. And we are told that, while the house is sinister, it does have good bones.
As the seconds pass, we move indoors. Children sit awake in their beds, children wander the halls, and a father in respectable blue pajamas comes to comfort his crying, ghost-touched daughter. “How long do we have to live here, Daddy?” she asks. “Well, your mother and I have to finish fixing this house, and then someone has to buy it,” he replies. “Then we can go?” she asks. Then, he says, they can go.
The 2018 Netflix recreation of The Haunting of Hill House isn’t just a reinterpretation of Jackson’s novel; it’s also part of a long tradition of American homeownership horror stories. These stories begin with a place. The place is bad, uncanny in a Freudian sense (the Austrian psychoanalyst’s word for the uncanny was unheimlich, which literally translates to un-home-like), but the place is also beautiful. In Rosemary’s Baby, American Horror Story, Dream House, Sinister, a lovely old structure, built with care and architectural flourishes—not to mention good bones—turns out to be a living nightmare. Often, the movie centers around a young couple or a young family. They quickly become trapped. The price was a trick. People don’t own the house. The house owns them. Like mold, it gets inside the unwitting buyers. It seeps into their lungs, their dreams, their bodies and minds, permeating everything.
There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped. Throughout American history, these stories have existed side by side. For people with the resources to buy in, one once felt more “real” than the other, but as we learned after the real estate crash of 2008, there’s truth to be found in both of them, especially for members of the cash-poor, dream-rich millennial generation.
Netflix’s iteration of The Haunting of Hill House is set in the 1990s. During this era, the primary power of homeownership was, in the words of then-President Bill Clinton, that it “strengthens families and stabilizes communities.” In a 1994 letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, Clinton emphasized his belief that homeownership was good for individuals, communities, the economy, and the nation. The following year, he released his National Homeownership Strategy, and at the ceremony announcing the plan, he called it a “big deal.” He said, “This is about more than money and sticks and boards and windows. This is about the way we live as a people and what kind of society we’re going to have.” Homeownership, according to conventional wisdom, was a path to a more stable, equitable future. It was emblematic of the American dream, the idea that, with enough hard work and honest labor, anyone could rise to the top. Anyone could own a four-bedroom brick house on a suburban backstreet with a tidy front lawn and a big yellow dog. Anyone could be successful. Anyone could be a CEO, a rock star, a president.
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Of course, most of this equation was, from the beginning, a fantasy—as much a metaphor as the uncanny ghost that traps unsuspecting buyers in its cycles of suffering. But while ghost stories represent the unspoken things that we fear most (chaos, abuse, sex, death, love), the myth of the American dream represents what we say out loud, the version of ourselves that we project into the world. As Americans, we want to believe in a meritocracy, even though the educational achievement gap has been growing steadily since the 1970s. We want to believe that all citizens can access homeownership, even though we’ve seen a recent drop in homeownership rates exclusively among African Americans. We want to believe that successful people are successful because they are deserving or God-chosen, not because they inherited huge amounts of money, wealth that was often built from exploitation and oppression. Ghosts allow us to speak about unspoken truths; the American dream gives us a solid framework on which to hang flimsy lies.
While academics and journalists questioned the conventional wisdom, the dominant idea was that buying a house was a solid investment plan, a responsible decision that required commitment (30 years of mortgage payments) and a sturdy sense of hope. American culture has always been oriented toward the future rather than reckoning with the past, and homeownership, particularly in the suburbs, was no different. Yet this wasn’t always part of the American dream. The American dream was originally about “rags to riches, coming from nothing and ending up a robber baron,” says Rachel Heiman, associate professor of anthropology at the New School. It was about money. It was only during the McCarthy era that homeownership became a crucial part of the story.
“People rarely realize that the desire to be a homeowner isn’t a purely natural desire, though we tend to think about it as inherent,” Heiman says. When we think about the McCarthy hearings, we often remember the Hollywood aspect—the glamorous stars persecuted for their supposed leftist leanings. But before McCarthy gave his famous anti-communist speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the senator had focused much of his career on opposing public housing and protecting corporate interests. Since the post-World War II period, the government had been providing housing to veterans and their families. “They did an extraordinary job of building affordable housing on a mass scale during the war,” explains Heiman. In the 1940s, McCarthy and other right-wing politicians became concerned that the housing projects had gone too far—McCarthy even called public housing “breeding ground for communists.” In the late 1940s, he sided with William Levitt (and other private manufacturers) in their fight against public housing projects. Levitt was promoting his cookie-cutter housing communities, which McCarthy believed were more in line with America’s capitalist economic structure and ideals. (“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do,” Levitt once famously said.) As the Cold War wore on, this sentiment grew, particularly among members of the Republican Party. From 1950 onward, Heiman says, “homeownership was packaged and sold.”
Suddenly, it became important for the U.S. government to shift its focus from providing housing for those in need to providing mortgage assistance. “The government helped people, but only white people, to get into the suburbs,” Heiman says. This was the legacy of redlining, a New Deal-era process of color-coding neighborhoods based on income, labeling some as good investments and others as “risky.” The government was more likely to help people refinance their homes or purchase homes in areas they deemed secure, which prevented generations of African Americans (who lived disproportionately in “risky,” i.e., low-income, areas) from being able to lift themselves out of poverty. Although redlining was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, the effects echoed through American culture for decades and continue to do so to this day. Popular culture also helped reinforce suburban segregation. Magazines and newspapers ran advertisements for Levittown and other similar housing developments, which nearly always showed white couples or children engaging in wholesome activities (one showed a young couple, man in uniform, drawing their dream house in the sand, while another showed a young white child jumping into a pool). Television advertisements were no better. The message was clear enough: The suburbs—and the American dream, by extension—weren’t for everyone.
The story starts with a gothic mansion, all stone turrets and peaked windows, a fortress-like structure. The camera descends from a dark swirling sky to a full moon to finally frame the mansion. A male voice narrates Shirley Jackson’s famous opening lines from her 1959 gothic novel, The Haunting of Hill House: “Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut,” he reads. We are told, from the moment we start the show, that this is a story about a house. And we are told that, while the house is sinister, it does have good bones.
As the seconds pass, we move indoors. Children sit awake in their beds, children wander the halls, and a father in respectable blue pajamas comes to comfort his crying, ghost-touched daughter. “How long do we have to live here, Daddy?” she asks. “Well, your mother and I have to finish fixing this house, and then someone has to buy it,” he replies. “Then we can go?” she asks. Then, he says, they can go.
The 2018 Netflix recreation of The Haunting of Hill House isn’t just a reinterpretation of Jackson’s novel; it’s also part of a long tradition of American homeownership horror stories. These stories begin with a place. The place is bad, uncanny in a Freudian sense (the Austrian psychoanalyst’s word for the uncanny was unheimlich, which literally translates to un-home-like), but the place is also beautiful. In Rosemary’s Baby, American Horror Story, Dream House, Sinister, a lovely old structure, built with care and architectural flourishes—not to mention good bones—turns out to be a living nightmare. Often, the movie centers around a young couple or a young family. They quickly become trapped. The price was a trick. People don’t own the house. The house owns them. Like mold, it gets inside the unwitting buyers. It seeps into their lungs, their dreams, their bodies and minds, permeating everything.
There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped. Throughout American history, these stories have existed side by side. For people with the resources to buy in, one once felt more “real” than the other, but as we learned after the real estate crash of 2008, there’s truth to be found in both of them, especially for members of the cash-poor, dream-rich millennial generation.
Netflix’s iteration of The Haunting of Hill House is set in the 1990s. During this era, the primary power of homeownership was, in the words of then-President Bill Clinton, that it “strengthens families and stabilizes communities.” In a 1994 letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, Clinton emphasized his belief that homeownership was good for individuals, communities, the economy, and the nation. The following year, he released his National Homeownership Strategy, and at the ceremony announcing the plan, he called it a “big deal.” He said, “This is about more than money and sticks and boards and windows. This is about the way we live as a people and what kind of society we’re going to have.” Homeownership, according to conventional wisdom, was a path to a more stable, equitable future. It was emblematic of the American dream, the idea that, with enough hard work and honest labor, anyone could rise to the top. Anyone could own a four-bedroom brick house on a suburban backstreet with a tidy front lawn and a big yellow dog. Anyone could be successful. Anyone could be a CEO, a rock star, a president.
Of course, most of this equation was, from the beginning, a fantasy—as much a metaphor as the uncanny ghost that traps unsuspecting buyers in its cycles of suffering. But while ghost stories represent the unspoken things that we fear most (chaos, abuse, sex, death, love), the myth of the American dream represents what we say out loud, the version of ourselves that we project into the world. As Americans, we want to believe in a meritocracy, even though the educational achievement gap has been growing steadily since the 1970s. We want to believe that all citizens can access homeownership, even though we’ve seen a recent drop in homeownership rates exclusively among African Americans. We want to believe that successful people are successful because they are deserving or God-chosen, not because they inherited huge amounts of money, wealth that was often built from exploitation and oppression. Ghosts allow us to speak about unspoken truths; the American dream gives us a solid framework on which to hang flimsy lies.
While academics and journalists questioned the conventional wisdom, the dominant idea was that buying a house was a solid investment plan, a responsible decision that required commitment (30 years of mortgage payments) and a sturdy sense of hope. American culture has always been oriented toward the future rather than reckoning with the past, and homeownership, particularly in the suburbs, was no different. Yet this wasn’t always part of the American dream. The American dream was originally about “rags to riches, coming from nothing and ending up a robber baron,” says Rachel Heiman, associate professor of anthropology at the New School. It was about money. It was only during the McCarthy era that homeownership became a crucial part of the story.
“People rarely realize that the desire to be a homeowner isn’t a purely natural desire, though we tend to think about it as inherent,” Heiman says. When we think about the McCarthy hearings, we often remember the Hollywood aspect—the glamorous stars persecuted for their supposed leftist leanings. But before McCarthy gave his famous anti-communist speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, the senator had focused much of his career on opposing public housing and protecting corporate interests. Since the post-World War II period, the government had been providing housing to veterans and their families. “They did an extraordinary job of building affordable housing on a mass scale during the war,” explains Heiman. In the 1940s, McCarthy and other right-wing politicians became concerned that the housing projects had gone too far—McCarthy even called public housing “breeding ground
Suddenly, it became important for the U.S. government to shift its focus from providing housing for those in need to providing mortgage assistance. “The government helped people, but only white people, to get into the suburbs,” Heiman says. This was the legacy of redlining, a New Deal-era process of color-coding neighborhoods based on income, labeling some as good investments and others as “risky.” The government was more likely to help people refinance their homes or purchase homes in areas they deemed secure, which prevented generations of African Americans (who lived disproportionately in “risky,” i.e., low-income, areas) from being able to lift themselves out of poverty. Although redlining was outlawed in 1968 by the Fair Housing Act, the effects echoed through American culture for decades and continue to do so to this day. Popular culture also helped reinforce suburban segregation. Magazines and newspapers ran advertisements for Levittown and other similar housing developments, which nearly always showed white couples or children engaging in wholesome activities (one showed a young couple, man in uniform, drawing their dream house in the sand, while another showed a young white child jumping into a pool). Television advertisements were no better. The message was clear enough: The suburbs—and the American dream, by extension—weren’t for everyone.
